Monday, November 4, 2019

Promised $2.5 million and a Mercedes, an Auburn senior wound up losing her life savings

Barbara Hinckley, 95, lost everything to a sweet-talking scam artist who
told her she'd placed second in a sweepstakes for the Publisher's
Clearing House.

By Steve Collins

Barbara Hinckley sits in her Auburn home with paperwork from a
monthslong scam that promised her millions of dollars and a new car, but
instead drained her life’s savings. Andree Kehn/Staff Photographer

AUBURN — When the phone rang in her trailer at the Ja-Lynne Mobile
Home Park off Turner Street on July 6, 95-year-old Barbara Hinckley
quickly answered it.

A friendly voice on the other end told her that he was David Sawyer,
prize director for Publishers Clearing House in New York, and he had
some good news: She’d won second prize in its annual contest.

That meant, he told her, that she could expect $2.5 million and a new Mercedes-Benz.

Hinckley said she didn’t need a new car and wasn’t even too sure about the cash.

“What would I do with all that money?” she asked. “What would anybody do with all that money?”

Three days after hearing she had won $2.5 million in a Publisher’s
Clearing House sweepstakes, Barbara Hinckley received a package that
included a purported copy of the check she would receive for $2.5
million. Provided image

But she didn’t see any reason to be suspicious. After all, she said,
she’d done business with the company off and on for three decades. She
also knew from its television commercials over the years that it really
does give away large sums.

Sawyer,
who struck Hinckley as a well-spoken, well-educated fellow, told her
she had two choices about how to handle her good fortune.

“You can do it publicly,” he said, with all the attendant publicity,
“or you can do it privately. But if you do it privately, it is just
between you and me. You can’t say anything about it to anyone.”

During the next six weeks, keeping it all mum from family and
friends, Hinckley forked over more than $16,000 in a series of transfers
that wiped out her life savings.

Right to the end, the man identifying himself as Sawyer, never dropped the pretense that Hinckley was a lucky winner.

In fact, though, she was just the latest — and, no doubt, not the
last — to be conned by crooks who prey on vulnerable, often lonely
seniors who are too trusting and naive. Publisher’s Clearing House,
which has long warned about the fraud, had nothing to do with the crime.

The Federal Trade Commission says that if somebody claims you won
something and then asks for a fee, it’s fake. “If you have to pay, it’s a
scam,” the agency says.

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who chairs the Senate Aging Committee, has long targeted scams aimed at the elderly.

“I have heard numerous heartbreaking stories of Mainers being robbed
of their hard-earned money, from amounts ranging from hundreds of
dollars to their entire life savings,” Collins said Friday. “One of my
top priorities as chairman of the Senate Aging Committee is to stop the
ruthless scam artists who steal billions of dollars from seniors each
year.”

“Last year, the bipartisan Senior $afe Act I authored was signed into
law, which helps protect seniors by encouraging the trained employees
of financial institutions to question suspicious transactions and report
suspected senior financial exploitation,” Collins said. “I have also
introduced legislation to prevent guardianship abuse and crack down on
robocalls, but more work remains to be done. Protecting our nation’s
seniors requires a coordinated response among all levels of government.”

This fall, her office said, staffers assisted an older Lewiston woman
robbed of her life savings through a lottery scam that came to light
after a teller noticed she was withdrawing large sums. The FBI is
investigating it.

For Hinckley and other seniors, it’s an all-too-common tale, usually
remaining under wraps because victims are too broken or ashamed to admit
they fell for cons ranging from “your grandson is in prison and needs
your help” to phone warnings that only immediate payments will stop the
Internal Revenue Service from seizing your home, both schemes that often
entrap unwary seniors.

Hinckley said she wanted to tell the story of this “sleazy business”
that happened to her because the only good that can come of her odyssey
is to let others know how it occurred so that they don’t fall victim as
well.

“I hope it never happens to other people,” she said. “It was horrible to live through.”

That first call from Sawyer came on a Saturday.

By Tuesday, the supposed company executive was fast on his way to
becoming a near-constant phone buddy, calling Hinckley “sweetheart” and
“baby girl,” asking about her health, her meals, her family and all
sorts of things.

“The conversation just kept going on and on and on,” Hinckley said. “We talked about everything, just about.”

Sawyer even mentioned President Donald Trump to her, calling him
“that freak down in Washington” whose new rules and regulations were
supposedly making it hard for his firm these days.

At first, Hinckley said, she wondered if it was some sort of flimflam
operation. She asked the caller flat-out whether she could trust him.

He told her she was “perfectly safe, that it was all on the up-and-up,” Hinckley said.

Within a week, Sawyer said he was heading to Auburn, calling her
before boarding a plane to Portland and then from the airport in Maine
and then from a hotel there. He even gave her the name of the hotel and
its phone number.

That was also when he first asked her to send money.

Sawyer provided some convoluted tale about why she had to send the
cash — placed inside the pages of three magazines in an overnight
package — so Publisher’s Clearing House could confirm her identity and
ensure that she could get her prizes.

“Gee, that doesn’t sound right,” Hinckley said in response. “I said
to him, ‘Asking me to send this is like scammers have done.’”

But Sawyer assured her she would get reimbursed soon. The fees she paid upfront, he said, were just a technicality.

They soon added up.

On July 10, she sent $3,490. Three days later, it was $500. On July
15, another $1,000. Three more days went by and then she sent $500 more.

On July 20, she mailed him $9,000. Then, after two more days passed, $2,000.

A teller at Mechanic Savings Bank asked her if she knew what she was doing — and even got a supervisor to come talk to her.

“That’s a lot of money,” Hinckley recalled the teller saying. “Are you sure?”

But Hinckley explained to the skeptical bankers that she would be getting it all back soon, nothing to worry about.

Somebody at the bank apparently didn’t buy it, since Hinckley’s
children got a call warning them that something was amiss. She said she
“sort of put off” subsequent questions from her family about the money.

“I was being loyal to the wrong people,” Hinckley said.

By early August, a month into the scam, Hinckley’s account was pretty much drained.

“Don’t worry about anything,” Sawyer told her. “You’re going to get this all back.”

Hinckley said that even though she enjoyed talking with Sawyer, the
experience became an ever greater worry, so upsetting that she lost
eight pounds fretting about it.

Hinckley, who retired at age 65, had built up her savings by working
multiple jobs for 46 years and spending as little as she could.
Typically, she said, she even added $200 a month from her pension and
Social Security checks to the stash.

She said she has always lived on the money she gets from Social
Security and a pension from her old job with the Auburn Housing
Authority, never touching the cash she’d socked away for the future.

“I just knew I was never going to spend it,” Hinckley said, but
having something set aside was a comfort — security for what could
happen.

The scam began to unravel in August, when Sawyer claimed he had
arrived at the Hilton Garden Inn in Auburn, preparing to get the car and
cash to Hinckley at last.

He called her to say he was on the way over to her home — a trailer
with a baby grand piano where the music-loving Hinckley had lived for 40
years. In the next call, though, just minutes later, he told her his
GPS was acting up and instead of nearing her place, he was actually over
by the post office on Rodman Road.

Before long, he was supposedly having his first lobster dinner in Maine at Mac’s Seafood in Auburn.

The man had all the details down, but nothing he couldn’t have found
easily on the internet. He talked as if he often came to Maine to see
her, but somehow could never quite get to her.

“This kept happening, over and over and over,” Hinckley said, with
Sawyer always friendly and solicitous, asking her about whether she’d
taken her medication, worn her seat belt and kept herself safe.

Sawyer promised repeatedly to come to her. But “always something
happened” that made it impossible or impractical, especially for a busy
executive with a wide portfolio, Hinckley said

Sawyer had Hinckley change her phone number a couple of times, once
knowing her new one even before she did. He kept switching his number,
too.

“You don’t want scammers getting to you,” Sawyer told Hinckley.

Calls by the Sun Journal to the last number Sawyer used to phone Hinckley went straight to voicemail. Nobody responded to them.

Hinckley still speaks of Sawyer with more than a hint of fondness, despite everything.

“He was very considerate,” she said, and obviously bright. He spoke
without an accent, only saying a few words oddly, but nothing that
triggered any concern.

Collins’ office and the AARP say scams like this one are often run out of Jamaica.

Hinckley sent money to addresses in Connecticut, North Carolina, Rhode Island and elsewhere, always changing.

Early on, she got a packet of information from a fellow in New
Britain, Connecticut — her address handwritten on a mailing label for a
Priority Mail package from the post office — that included copies of
prize letters, Internal Revenue Service documents, picture of other
prize winners and such, clearly meant to bolster Sawyer’s tale but short
on any solid information.

The language sometimes displayed fake formality and twisted legalese,
but to someone unfamiliar with such things, it seemed to have a ring of
authenticity.

But Hinckley grew suspicious as her savings dwindled.

On Aug. 6, she mailed a check for $4,300 to a man in Greenville,
North Carolina — and then thought better of it. She made sure it
bounced.

Out of money, worried and increasingly convinced she’d been tricked, Hinckley said she finally fessed up to a family member.

“I’m in something over my head,” she said. “I need help.”

Within a day, the bank, the police and others were told. But nobody
had an answer for how to find Sawyer, how to get her money back or how
to roll back the clock to July 5.

“My family was ready to lock me up” in an assisted-living facility, Hinckley said, but she refused to go.

“If you’re going to take away all of my independence,” she said she told them, then “you might as well shoot me.”

Instead, they all agreed to let someone else control her finances. By then, though, her savings had vanished.

“I gave it all away,” she said sadly. “I felt so stupid.”

The problem, Hinckley said, is that “I never think anybody would do anything to hurt me.”

The next time Sawyer phoned, she told him she’d talked to the police
and knew she’d been the victim of a scam. She told him, as the police
urged her to say, not to call ever again.

But he didn’t listen.

Hinckley said he kept calling, repeatedly, for days and weeks. She ignored him.

By mid-September, she’d had it.

She said she knew it was hopeless, that she’d been the victim of a thief.

And yet, when Sawyer called one day to tell her he was in town and
had the $2.5 million, Hinckley didn’t just tell him to get lost.

She said she wanted to find out if there was any chance that maybe it
wasn’t all just a fraud. She said she wanted to be sure, to be
absolutely positive.

Sawyer insisted he just wanted “to prove my honesty to you once and for all.”

So Hinckley listened as Sawyer said he could refund all her money to her that very day.

All he needed, he said, was $285 to pay a police officer to escort him to her home.

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